What are web standards?
Standards compliance is like building a home to code. The only difference is that web standards are recommendations, not the law. If your website caves in, no one gets hurt.
Built to last
Web standards make your site flexible. A standards compliant site will look great in new and current web browsers, and will be accessible to people with visual or motor handicaps. Getting your site to look great on a cell phone or PDA is a lot easier with web standards. They also help when printing your site's pages. All in all, they make the job quicker for designers, and help when multiple people are working on your site.
Faster, smarter Websites
One of the tenets of web standards is separating information from presentation. At its core, a webpage is just like a document in a word processor, or a chapter in a novel. It's got a title, headings, and words - all black text on white background.
From this plain document, you can add layout, colors and font styles separately, or you can put them directly into the document. Embedded styles work fine for one page, but how many one page websites are there? If you make the site with web standards, you can share one page's layout with as many pages as you need. You can also use that layout for future pages, or change it later on if you want to give your site a new look.
What's wrong with tables?
Using tables for design is inefficient, slow to load, and hard to update. Each page on the site has to load up its layout, font styles and colors. With web standards, one file is kept by the browser and referenced for each new page it loads. That way it only needs to download information it already has.
Standards compliant sites make more money
Working with web standards saves you money by saving your clients time. When big sites like Amazon and Google reduce their page loading time by just 1%, they see an equivalent increase in usage and sales.
